gardening Articles

Butterflies I run through a field of butterflies. Sun-kissed wings brush my arms. Delicate. Glowing. White. I must be in heaven. “They’re not butterflies. They’re moths,” she said. Pests to society. Destroying the world. Life is what you see. I see butterflies. Swirling, graceful. Joy. One-million white wings, blowing in the wind, fluttering. The eye of a storm of butterflies…

It’s a beautiful afternoon. Our friends came to see our new chickens, and we delayed doing homework. We said goodbye and walked back toward the house. Declan picked a handful of tall grass. He put it in his mouth. “Don’t put plants in your mouth” I said. “Vegetables are plants, are you saying not to eat vegetables?” I wish…

Thanks for playing. The game’s simple. All you have to do is answer, “What’s in that mason jar?” Yup, it’s homemade… The prize? There’s always a prize for a game show. The prize–you get to eat it! What? You can’t eat it because it doesn’t come from a frozen dinner box and there are no GMOs? Give me a…

I’m growing my own food again this year. Last year, I didn’t get it quite right. The bugs had dinner before I could. I read every book on organic farming, yet still, they ate my veggies, impervious to my reading. There were grubs, slugs, and beetles, and other things I couldn’t identify. Every morning, I’d go out and check on the…

Fiber. That’s all it is. I ate the sticker on the tomato. They’re insidious. Hidden on every piece of produce, down to the last pea. My fault for not eating in season. These tomatoes were grown far, far away. I try to eat locally. Tomatoes are grown in winter greenhouses here. That’s worse for the environment though….

Daylight savings time. An antiquated system that keeps kids from going to bed at night–it’s still light out–and gives every single Yankee farmer more time to plant potatoes. Apparently no one can plant potatoes earlier in the day. Daylight savings time is the Scantron test of the farm world–old things that never seem to fade. Who in…

Seed catalog season. They started coming last month. I really should be planning the garden. I can virtually smell it around me… Wait, that’s compost. It’s been a couple weeks and a few feet of snow since I took out the compost. That little carbon filter in the top of the pail’s done its duty. Can’t smell it…

I make fun of my friends with large families. I say insensitive things like, “Here, take Declan. You’ll never know he’s there. You have too many kids to count anyway.” I’ve said that twice this summer alone. Just this week I said it to my friends up from Texas… They’re amazing. They have three boys that eat…

I marched to the garden. In actuality, I wanted to run but Rusty said, “That’s just stupid.” I knew it was. I didn’t say, “Because it’s the intelligent thing to do, I want to go for a run.” I just wanted to run. I like to run. I download some reggae, specifically Third World’s 96 Degrees in…

Today’s Saturday. Dates and times are irrelevant to me for the next seven weeks until school starts. This is the time of year when you hate me. The time of year when I call you randomly, email you at all times, and disturb you at work. You get annoyed. “I’m working! Don’t you have something to do?”…